A guide to all media
Before the rise of Web 2.0 brought us sites like Wikipedia and Youtube, finding readily availble information was a lot more difficult. And on my first outings on the Internet back in the late ’90s, the 28 kbps and later 56 kpbs dial-up modems wouldn’t have really cut it for large downloads or watching videos. The sound of my modem dialling the server (then with a company called OzEmail) used to be the bane of my existence in a time when phone line dropouts were aplenty.
But one site I was able to visit that had a readily available large database of music information was allmusic.com. The site wasn’t pretty when I first visited it, but once you found the page you were looking for, the information was gold. It recommended CDs that were unavailable; nowhere else on the Internet could I find definitive information about what albums had been released by the more underground bands. Not even the most diverse CD shops had these CDs available and because allmusic gives reviews of 1 star to 5 stars, I knew which CDs to order and which to avoid.
AMG began in 1991. It originated as a database called All Music Guide set up by Michael Erlewine, internet entrepreneur and astrologer. The information on this database was used by AMG to publish books about the “best” music available. The movie database was added in 1994. Then in 1995, allmusic and allmovie (but called All Music Guide and All Movie Guide) were moved online, not only as a comprehensive database for these two kinds of entertainment, but also so that AMG could find more customers for the licensing side of the business (and this continues to today with the licencees including Microsoft, Yahoo! and Amazon). The music, film and game site now all fall under the one brand, All Media Group (AMG).
The websites today still aren’t that pretty, but it is an improvement on the past. A company called Macrovision acquired the AMG in November last year . The ads on the ‘all’ sites are sparse; one banner ad, a box ad and an advertisement for a featured album where you can scroll over and click to listen to the band’s music or buy the album.
Reviews and information are the order of the day on allmusic.com. Looking up a band such as Radiohead will take you to a full description of them. Read a bio; check out who the band members are and what other projects they have undertaken; click on the similar artists to expand your music knowledge and library; find out who they were influenced by and then see who they’ve influenced. Then watch their music videos and see who else has performed in the band. And all this before checking out their discography, reading album reviews and individual reviews of songs where available. While the videos are obviously a more recent addition (because of our faster internet connections), the ability to connect to other artists has always been a useful tool.
The site isn’t just limited to one genre of music either. They try to be as comprehensive as possible, even including bands from countries where English is not the native language. See X-Japan, the extreme metal (ballads included) big hair-do 80s band of Japan, for an example.
Reviews are provided by either the Editors of the site, or “expert contributors” and they state in the about us section that “editorial independence has always been an AMG hallmark.” Music ratings from this website are often published along with those from other music websites such as metacritic (a site that averages scores from professional newspapers and online reviews) and Pitchfork Media on information pages for bands on Wikipedia.
The music blog began in 2006. One of the major features of the blog is the way they organise entries by dividing them into different catagories. One particularly interesting one is the “Judged by their Covers” category which shows all sorts of weird and wacky album covers from around the world.This doesn’t mean that each catagory is updated all the time. Rather, each post on the main blog is then catagorised for easy location.
Allmovie has similar in set up to allmusic. It is also primarily a reviews site. Check Star Wars, and we get a plot synopsis and other important information including themes, box office, length and so on. The most interesting part of the reviews of films though are the similar movies section, the links to movies with the same Personnel, other related movies (for example, followed by, related to, is part of the series, influenced and is spoofed in (the obvious one for Star Wars is of course Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs).
Over to the movie blog. Like the allmusic blog, entries are divided into catagories. One of the most entertaining here is “The Hype Machine” where bloggers talk about rumours of upcoming films as well as ‘hype’ surrounding upcoming films (a good example is a post where the author, Camilla Albertson, critiques the trailer for the film Valkyrie).
Allgame is just a games reviews site.
Allmusic and allmovie are great sites with bucketloads of information. It is interesting to see how they have changed with the times as competitors have shown up. But the reviews remain interesting and the information up-to-date, and this is what sets them apart.
